Diego Marani - The Interpreter

I love you.

Irene

A chasm opened up within me, and I plunged into a black magma which burned my vital organs without filling them. I was breathing from my throat, unable to open my lungs, paralysed by the sheer horrific vastness of my discovery. I tore open the third and last letter, the one dated 20th July, bearing a Zurich postmark.

My cruel friend,

Where have you gone? What has become of you? I’ve looked for you everywhere. You don’t answer the phone; you’re not at home, I’ve been by a thousand times and rung your bell, at every time of day. The concierge was starting to give me funny looks. There’s never a light on in any of your windows; I sat outside in the car for one whole night, waiting to see when you’d get back, what you were doing. In the white light of the moon, I imagined rooms I’d never seen; it’s only now, after two months of knowing you, that I realise you’ve never shown me your house. I even started to think that perhaps you didn’t live there at all, that the card you’d given me wasn’t even yours. I went to look for you at the ‘Etoile’ cinema but they didn’t know anything about you either; at the sight of those dark red seats, my heart missed a beat. I asked the cinema manager to let me into the interpreting booths for a moment; in yours, I thought there was still a ghost of your smell. You’ll say that that’s impossible; it must be because I’ve still got it in my nostrils, and seeing places where I’d been with you just brought it back. I started to cry. The manager beckoned me to go down again, but I couldn’t because I was crying, and when he noticed, he came up and closed the curtain. Please, write to me, tell me where you are, just tell me that you’re still alive, goddammit! You’ve got my address in Zurich, write to me there. I’ll be leaving soon, I can’t bear to stay in this city any more, it’s been poisoned by unbearable memories; even the light of the changing times of day reminds me of you. So at two o’clock I’m in agony because you aren’t meeting me in front of the station, at three because we’re not strolling through the empty Sunday streets, just you and me, cars parked and cats on windowsills; and then again at four, when I can no longer see you but hear your voice in my head, your voice which speaks so many words, all the world’s words, except for those I long to hear. What are you looking for? What ghost are you pursuing, what secret suffering has you on its hook? Or is it you who are in flight? From what, from whom? Are you a murderer who has left gruesome acts behind you? Why don’t you tell me about them? Why have you never talked to me of yourself? It is only now that I realise that it’s not you I am in love with, but the characters in the films that you translated: a different man each Sunday, because that’s all you’ve ever given me of yourself. So now it’s Piotr I’m in love with, perhaps because he was the first, laden with promise, and perhaps because he was the gentlest of them. But Piotr hanged himself, poor bastard! And you’re not here, you never have been, you’ve never existed! In which case, how shall I ever forget you? How can I wipe you out of my mind, you who are the sum of so many absences, the blank mirror in which I seek… you, who are nobody, and myself. And who can rid me of myself?

I shall love you forever.

Irene

Irene, my Irene slave to that madman! Now I understood those restless Sundays, the windy afternoons of that fateful spring when I would watch her preparing eagerly for her cinema matinees. I shouldn’t have let her go alone, least of all to the foreign season. But who could have known, who could have possibly imagined…It was all so unbearable that I felt a sudden desire not to believe it. I might have been able to leave that room, go down into the road and cross the little garden as though I had discovered nothing. But those three letters in their yellow envelopes had put a stop to that; rather, what they did was to trigger off new suffering in me. That man was like a maelstrom, sucking anyone who approached him into his vortex; he had swallowed up Irene, inexorably dragging her away from me and then contaminating me too with his own vile evil.

I picked up the letters and stuffed them back into their envelopes, thrusting them into my pocket. Outside, the sky was now becoming covered with low, threatening banks of cloud; inside, too, darkness was gathering, the first raindrops pattering on the dirty windowpanes. The lift started up, and a square of light fell on the table, revealing a thick layer of dust disturbed by the wanderings of my hands. I was on the point of leaving when my eye was caught by a piece of folded paper tucked beneath an ugly glass vase placed in the centre of the table. In the midst of such chaos, the table was the only surface which had been left unencumbered — except for that vase, with that bit of crumpled paper. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a list, written in capitals, with the names of various far distant, scattered cities:

Vancouver

San Diego

Papeete

Vladivostok

Pusan

Taipei

Surabaya

Durban

Eilat

Constanta

Odessa

Klaipeda

Tallinn

Apart from Constanta, Odessa, Klaipeda and Tallinn, the others were all crossed out. I saw those places — so far away, so different — as tracing an unbroken line around the globe, thickening in the Far East and then again in Europe but leaving a vast gap between Surabaya and Durban. Then I realised that it must be an itinerary, some abstruse trail to be followed up. I imagined that, rather than heeding Dr Barnung’s warnings and placing himself in his hands, that man had ended up believing his own visions and had hurtled off to those far-flung places in search of the phantasmagorical language whose existence his madness had summoned into being. He had visited them one by one, striking them off his list; the only ones left to visit were Constanta, Odessa, Klaipeda and Tallinn. I remembered his study course: Romanian, Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Estonian, four of the few languages with which he was as yet unacquainted and which he had perhaps gone to seek out, following his own crack-brained theories. I imagined him drinking his fill of words which his famished mouth was learning to savour; at each new one he uttered, I saw his own appearance shifting, a kaleidoscope of masks. I was tempted to think that perhaps that man was one of many, that I had encountered just one, but that there were hundreds of others like him, pursuing one another, wandering round the globe, usurping voices and faces not their own, leaving a trail of old clothes, shoes and mineral water bottles strewn behind them, as in that flat: the indecipherable armoury of madness. I decided that I would root him out from wherever he was hiding: no longer to help him, or to pool our sufferings, but rather to witness the course and climax of his madness for myself. My heart full of glee, watching him as he gasped, racked by spasmodic seizures, I would tell him that soon all his languages would crumble away and dissolve into one rank mush. Secretly, though, I sensed that it was not just the poisonous desire for vengeance that was driving me towards him. No, something stronger was at work, something I was trying to hold in check within my mind: some frightening affinity, some inexplicable and voluntary attraction which I was trying to resist with all the strength that I could muster. I felt a physical need to sense him at my side, to hear his voice, to smell the bitter odour he gave out, as though he were at once cause and cure of all my woes.

Sensing that it was late, I shook off these thoughts; by lingering on such fantasies, I too was running the risk of going mad. The evil blossoming in the soft reaches of my mind might overwhelm me; if I wished to avoid the fate awaiting the interpreter, I would have to shuffle off such crazed woolgathering; I would have to set about finding a cure and close up the dangerous wound which was cleaving me in twain.